What Chip Design Can Learn from Supersonic Jets
Lessons from Boom Supersonic’s engineering culture and what they mean for the future of chip design.
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In January 2025, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 jet broke the sound barrier—an achievement made possible not by sheer manpower or astronomical budgets, but by a radically different engineering philosophy. With just 50 engineers and one-tenth of the usual aerospace budget, Boom achieved something that had historically required armies of people and enormous resources.
Their CEO, Blake Scholl, is right here on Substack, where he explains the mentality behind building engineering teams that made this possible. As I read through his article with great interest (highly recommend it), the parallels I saw between designing supersonic jets and chip design were striking.
Both are traditionally constrained by outdated workflows, siloed teams, and tools that have barely evolved since the 1990s.
Both are incredibly complex, demand massive system-level optimizations, and involve vast design spaces.
Both take enormous amounts of time, people and money.
So if Boom Supersonic could seemingly do the impossible, what would it take for the chip industry to do the same?
Legacy Workflows Are Holding Back Innovation
Most engineering teams want time-tested silicon blocks to prevent things from going wrong. While working with components with ‘flight history’ quite literally prevents jets and chips from exploding, the downside is the unwillingness to push the limits of what is possible.
The bureaucratic structure enforced by engineering leaders especially in large companies often slows things more than practically necessary. Chip companies grow larger as teams become narrowly specialized. Each group does its part and then hands the work to the next set of experts. What the linearization of electronic design provides in traceability and ownership, it takes away in parallelism, efficiency and system optimization.
Scholl observes the same thing in the aerospace industry:
Most aerospace design tools and practices are stuck in the 1990s—with lots of custom engineering trapped in Excel spreadsheets and laborious handoffs from engineer to engineer. If something changes, re-running analyses becomes expensive and time-consuming, severely limiting the ability to iterate rapidly.
Boom as a company made a conscious choice to break out of this paradigm.
Invent Together
Hiring exceptional talent is a bare minimum. But Scholl explains that there’s more to it (emphasis mine):
At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI. We've taken the unconventional approach of embedding software engineers—typically with high curiosity but little or no aerospace experience—directly within our hardware teams.
This creates cross-pollination of ideas and tools that dramatically accelerates progress, and brings in a team culture that Scholl describes as ’invent together.’
Such a radically inclusive approach to operating an engineering team is unheard of in the chip industry primarily due to rigid hiring practices with teams often over-indexing on domain expertise, filtering out unconventional talent. Hardware and software engineers work in silos, rarely with a mandate to deeply understand each other’s challenges.
Establishing the right corporate culture is critical. Without it, we have witnessed major companies lose their competitive edge.
Who will build “mkChip”?
By closely integrating software and hardware engineers, Boom didn’t rely on off-the-shelf engineering tools. Instead, they developed mkBoom, an in-house software platform that automated the aircraft design process end-to-end. mkBoom enabled engineers to co-simulate the passenger seating with the engine design resulting in an extra 1,000 miles of flight range. Jevons paradox when applied to engineering would loosely read: the easier it gets to iterate on your design, the better your eventual design quality. This results in unconventional design choices that form the bedrock of engineering marvels like the XB-1.
Most chip companies shy away from building internal software infrastructure. The reluctance stems from the need to maintain professional-grade software, which hardware companies often do not have the talent to accomplish (because they over-indexed on hardware engineers) or are unwilling to invest the resources to reap the benefits in the long run.
With the rise of AI coding assistants, the barrier to entry into software design is only getting lower. Today, every hardware engineer must learn to code. Coding assistants will make you a lot more productive.
The design space for chips is always exponentially growing and the cost of leading edge nodes is astronomical. Leveraging software and computing to automate your engineering and explore vast design spaces is the only way to out-engineer the competition and build truly world-class chip designs quickly and economically.
The question is not whether this is possible. The question is: who will build the chip design equivalent — mkChip?
Make Chip Design Enjoyable Again
Boom’s engineers highlight that their tools reduced rote engineering work and made their jobs more enjoyable. This is a crucial but often ignored aspect.
Unfortunately, most chip design tools have steep learning curves. To move the perception of chip design being a grind, to becoming a truly enjoyable experience requires a complete rethink of our design interfaces today. Clunky, unintuitive, and slow interfaces quickly become frustrating to use. When tools are painful, engineers avoid iterating. When iteration slows, innovation stagnates.
The chip industry must recognize that good tools are not just accelerators of design—they are amplifiers of human creativity. A generation of engineers who find joy in the process will naturally push the boundaries of what’s possible.
This is a plea to the EDA industry: please make your tool interfaces aesthetically beautiful because design tools shape the speed and creativity of the entire industry. A chip design engineer sitting down to work should feel like they in a beautiful garden, and not in a dungeon chained to the wall. EDA companies should talk to the customer about aesthetics, and not just functionality of their toolkits.
The story of Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 is about rethinking how software and hardware should co-evolve. By embedding software deeply into hardware teams, building in-house platforms like mkBoom, and creating environments that encourage joyful iteration, the semiconductor industry could unlock its own supersonic leap forward.
This seems like a good thread to share what Robert Fennis has been doing with EMerge. Ton's of amazing Python libraries out there, but for electromagnetic numerical methods I didn't find any success with the open source libraries. EMerge is open source and an efficient finite element method (FEM) solver that I've found good agreement with Ansys HFSS: https://www.emerge-software.com/. EM simulation is one key aspect of RF chip design.
Awesome conclusion. I have been saying again and again that the tools are the biggest hindrance to make "thousand startups bloom". Also the mindset of people in the traditional chip industry is horrible.
For eg: I have rarely seen any of my colleagues "complain" about the tools being used or even thinking that there needs to be a change. All they do is grind through the issues or "workaround". All these workarounds ends up being tribal knowledge. So you can see that this grind ensures their job security and safety. Working with such people is really suffocating. Not accepting the status quo was what made the American chip industry boom!
Also the crap hardware tool workflows leak into software. Seeing horrible unmaintainable perl scripts to automate and validate, it really takes the interest out of development.
I thought the new graduates who enter into the industry would at least feel that a change is needed but no. All they do is embrace the grind! They accept that the tools are sent from God and use it unquestionably without thinking twice that there can be an alternate solution. Mind you, I am not asking them to write one, just to think which does not cost any money!
Also working in Embedded software in a traditional chip company is a sure shot way to kill your skills. The only thing they do is iterate on the existing IP, drivers etc. with very little innovation. It is much better to work in companies which actually use these chips to solve a problem who will anyway discard all the BS firmware and write their own to have better control.
Who will make the next "mkBoom"? I am betting on Chinese companies. With all the tariffs and sanctions, I see industry and research institutes collaborate and invest in developing their own EDA tools with their own fab ecosystem. Many of the tools are also open source too. Also writing EDA tools is not the most difficult thing, the ecosystem around it and all the validation is the difficult and painful part. So actual usage of alternate tools rather than the traditional ones will force this ecosystem to take notice and accept.